Google and Matt Cutts announced that site speed is now a factor in Google’s ranking algorithm, this means you need to refine your websites and remove all unnecessary code. Clean coding is good coding, and will make your websites easier to update, maintain, and upgrade in the future.
One thing to note: Page load time is a small factor and will not be given the weight that other factors have; relevance, topicality, reputation, value-add, backlinks, keyword usage are all much more important ranking signals. Google uses over 200 elements in their search engine ranking algorithm, and page speed will affect less than 1% of all current search results.
Here are some page speed optimization tips that will help you decrease website load time.
Coding Best Practices For Fast Websites
- Make Fewer HTTP Requests
- Use a Content Delivery Network
- Add an Expires Header
- Gzip Components
- Avoid Redirects
- Put Stylesheets at the Top
- Put Scripts at the Bottom
- Avoid CSS Expression
- Make JavaScript and CSS External
- Reduce DNS Lookups
- Minimize JavaScript
- Remove Duplicate Scripts
- Configure Entity Tags (ETags)
- Make AJAX Cacheable
- Remove External Third Party Scripts Such As: analytics, widgets, graphical icons, comments, social media (you can move th on your own server)
The insight behind these best practices is the fact that only 10-20% of the browser response time is spent getting the HTML document to the end user. Spend your time on the 80-90% that is hidden behind the page to make your pages noticeably faster. This is for optimizing the way servers and browsers handle that 80-90% of the user experience with advanced webpages.
For more information and further reading about site speed algorithm changes
Steve Souders’ 14 Rules for Faster-Loading Web Sites
More page load time information at seomofo
Improve the performance of your website with Google site speed
Intenseblog tips to optimize html pages for fast loading times.
16 Responses
Seriously does everyone else spend a lot of time on-line waiting for SEO’s blog sites to load – I’m glad Google penalizes slowness!
SEO is for people who don’t know how to write well. And if you can’t afford a fast web server then just get out of the game.
The sitespeed algorithm is broken, google is not accurately measuring our site.
I was studying some of the seo content supposed to make our site faster, but we still take 3 seconds to load.
Your site appears great, that i’m happy i have found one thing I can do to make by website load faster.
We use cartoons to help demonstrate web marketing services.
what’s your opinion into the future with the search engine optimization industry? I have been facing a number of tough problems in my company, and need to understand the new SEO methodology.
Real nice design and style and wonderful site speed tutorial.
These tips to increase site speed are helpful. Our analytics tell us that site speed won’t help your rankings much, but it can definitely hurt them.
Hi just thought i would tell you something.. This is twice now i’ve landed on your blog in the last 2 days hunting for SEO information.
I found it notable that Google is using website speed, but Bing/Yahoo are not.
One of the best sites I have found that discuss why you should optimize your site for loading speed.
I found your blog was the only one that mentioned page load times as a search engine ranking factor. Time to get off Godaddy!
My life is hands down better now that I understand Google’s algorithms. Page speed is the future of the Internet.